ABSTRACT
Co. Chiarrai /Kerry Kerry is in the province of Munster , the Irish dialects of which are the basis of modem literary Irish because this was the richest part of the country to maintain Irish widely to the nineteenth century and here had been the necessary wealth to support a literate class to create a literature for revivalists to rediscover. Unfortunately this same relative wealth provided more impetus to English on the petering out of the Penal Laws and by 1926 the Gaeltacht Commission could find only small areas in which Irish was at all secure. There is no evidence that the use of the Munster literary dialect as the basis of modem standard Irish as promoted through the schools has been of any special benefit to the maintenance of normal dail y use among native speakers in the province. Rates of decline slowed everywhere after 1922, but as Munster's was most advanced at the beginning there was less to lose. (See p. 205.) Today it is generally accepted that if the rules for the award of the deontas were applied strictly in regard to the requirement for Irish to be the habitual language of the home then at most a single handful of schools would show a majority, and possibly none at all.
